File Requirements for Print

Among all the things we do, we design magazines, covers and guides for clients. This page serves as a guide for best practices for the printing industry if you are submitting to us for inclusion in a publication.

Files with “rich black” as a colour. Most printing plants want to know if there are these kinds of files in a document. Rich black has an ink allocation for the cyan, magenta, yellow, AND black and can be a headache at the press level because four colours are being piled on top of each other.

PDFs with live fonts. We prefer you flatten or “kill” the fonts before submitting. If you cannot or don’t know how, submit anyway.

Text documents printed out and submitted on a piece of paper. This means we have to retype them and that makes us grumpy.

Not Acceptable

Web graphics (resolution is too low and will print blurry)

Images (logos, pictures, graphics) within a Word document (although not hard to get out of the document, they are usually the wrong resolution)

Text saved as a jpeg or tif (which will also print blurry)

Live text on any file whereby you want that actual font and we don’t know its name. We usually carefully pick the typefaces but if there is something you absolutely must have then you must name it to us. If it is a free font, tell us where to download it otherwise licensing restrictions tell us to buy the typeface and we will charge accordingly (usually $20 to $40 per weight).

CorelDraw! original files (please convert to eps format)

Publisher files. We cannot open those types of files.

Power Point files. We cannot open those files either.

If you have files to upload, upload them here. Contact us first for a password to access the page if it has not been sent to you yet.